Soupspoon wrote:On the other hand, I don't mind people in my office seeing my, often psychedelically patterned, ties. But if they can see my draws (of whatever style) I suppose have to just hope that it's just a dream that I've left my trousers at home.

Do you pronounce "draw" and "drawer" the same? I've only seen the latter used for the clothing article.

Soupspoon wrote:On the other hand, I don't mind people in my office seeing my, often psychedelically patterned, ties. But if they can see my draws (of whatever style) I suppose have to just hope that it's just a dream that I've left my trousers at home.

Do you pronounce "draw" and "drawer" the same? I've only seen the latter used for the clothing article.

Pretty much. Especially with the plurals "draws" (also 3rd-person present of "to draw") and "drawers" being "dror'z" with barely a difference to the apostrophic transition. Takes an effort, or conscious emphasis. e.g. a person who enacts the drawing of metal into wire is a "dror-ur", compared with an artist who is a more a "dro-er". Needs proper IPA treatment, I feel, and there's much of my natal accent and childhood exposure to how others used the terms in that, anyway.

It's an established homophonic pun (see first para), and that it doesn't necessarily work in text form isn't my fault.

"disc" vs. "disk". For me, they're different things. On an old fashioned computer, discs and disks go in different parts of the computer. Computers eventually no longer used disks, and plenty of modern computers don't even use discs anymore.

Aiwendil wrote:Do you pronounce "draw" and "drawer" the same? I've only seen the latter used for the clothing article.

Pretty much.

No matter how well I understand intellectually that British English works this way, it still boggles my mind.

To me, as an American English speaker, "draw" and "drawer" are pronounced about as differently from one another as "paw" and "poem" are, or "jaw" and "Joel". Which is to say, pretty differently. Different vowels, different lengths, and one of them has an extra consonant on the end.

And the really weird thing is that I find British accents to be mostly intelligible. The most noticeable difference is Brits pronouncing words like "bath", "pass", and "sample" with an /a/ (as in "father") rather than an /æ/ (as in "cat"). I don't really notice them leaving the "r" out of all their words. One would think something like that would be really, really noticeable.

Well, "father" with an /a/ like "cat" (or /æ/, for both) isn't unknown..

What version of 'a' do you get in Capstick Comes Home (search for it, looks like it has been Youtubed several times, though it's originally a comedy record that came #3 in the charts in '81), and do you think we could get the word "wazzock" used more, internationally?

ThirdParty wrote:↶I don't really notice them leaving the "r" out of all their words. One would think something like that would be really, really noticeable.

The reason for this is that people mischaracterise non-rhoticity. The usual characterisation is that we "leave out the r" but this isn't really accurate; we still have an /r/ phoneme there it just has a null pronunciation before another consonant or at the end of an utterance. Even when this phoneme isn't pronounced, it majorly affects the pronunciation of the preceding vowel (which is why RP has a bunch more vowels than GA).

So, even if you don't know it, your brain is still picking up on the presence of the /r/ and so you're finding it perfectly understandable.

It still results in lots of homophones that aren't homophonous in American English, like "soar"/"saw".

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

To add my voice, Soar (glide / fly), saw ("had seen" / a tool) and sore (achey-hurty-feeling / a skin lesion) are also nearasdamnit homophonic for me. "I am sore I never saw the Shuttle soar aloft" seems to act as a proof of that, recited to myself in a neutral tone. Whilst stressing any of the three differently gives them nothing but (interchangeable) inflective differences, only context really differentiates them.

Sower (agriculturalist) and sewer (tailor/seamstress) are also identical to each other (and different to the sewer that is a drain, which is in turn like a person who is looking for law-backed recompense), but they might not be always so different to "soar" to various North British (NI&S) accents of my general yet inexpert acquaintance. They may converge on 1.5ish vowels from each direction (while leaving saw/sore behind, and maybe differentiating) but I can't be entirely certain without getting someone to try saying it for real. Still, maybe worth mentioning.

gmalivuk wrote:It still results in lots of homophones that aren't homophonous in American English, like "soar"/"saw".

The words "soar" and "saw" sound very different in my speech. "soar" is not "saw" with an /r/ at the end for me. The vowel is different.

There are also other differences in vowels. In particular, the cot-caught merger doesn't affect vowels before r, making saw and draw more different from sore/soar and drawer in those dialects (though there may be other differences as well).To me, I think of sore/soar as sew/sow with an r at the end (distinguished from sower and sewer "one who sews" in number of syllables), though that might be influenced by spelling.

Mega85 wrote:The words "soar" and "saw" sound very different in my speech.

Sure, but I wasn't talking about your speech.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

I wonder if an onomatopoeia like "humph" would count. It seems to describe the sound people make when rapidly closing the mouth in disdain after starting to make some sort of sound (e.g. "huh"). Maybe that's a stretch, though.

Eebster the Great wrote:I wonder if an onomatopoeia like "humph" would count. It seems to describe the sound people make when rapidly closing the mouth in disdain after starting to make some sort of sound (e.g. "huh"). Maybe that's a stretch, though.

"slurp" is also arguably in this category. In its case, the whole thing is onomatopoetic, but the "p" does represent the closing of lips after completing the action.

"Yelp" probably counts, though that's another one where the whole word is an onomatopoeia. "Giddyap" is short for "get ye up" (I actually had to look this one up, I thought it's full form was obvious until I realized I didn't actually know what it was).

Really? You think a lot of people say the word "yell" and then quickly close their mouths? I mean, it makes sense for "nope", "yep", and "welp" since "no", "yeah", and "well" are common words and are also frequently used as one-word utterances. "Yell" is quite different.

Really? You think a lot of people say the word "yell" and then quickly close their mouths? I mean, it makes sense for "nope", "yep", and "welp" since "no", "yeah", and "well" are common words and are also frequently used as one-word utterances. "Yell" is quite different.

Not "yell", but more of a general shout of pain and then quickly closing their mouth, which might be transcribed as "yelp".

I feel like that's the difference, though, that in the three listed cases, it's an established word that took on an onomatopoeic element in reference to a linguistic thing that happens to it sometimes, which seems like ... a pretty unusual phenomenon really.

So much depends upon a red wheel barrow (>= XXII) but it is not going to be installed.

Really? You think a lot of people say the word "yell" and then quickly close their mouths? I mean, it makes sense for "nope", "yep", and "welp" since "no", "yeah", and "well" are common words and are also frequently used as one-word utterances. "Yell" is quite different.

Not "yell", but more of a general shout of pain and then quickly closing their mouth, which might be transcribed as "yelp".

Except that these are very old words whose meanings have evolved since they split. Back in Proto-Germanic, when "gielpan" was invented as a modified form of the established word "gielan", "gielan" meant "to sing" (see "nightingale" = "night singer") and "gielpan" meant "to boast".

When I floated the idea of "yelp", I was considering arguing that "yell" is the sort of syllable one might sing (see "yodel" = "to utter a 'yo'"). If one were feeling boastful, and wanted to indicate that one's song had been perfect and there was nothing that could be added to it, one could then smack one's lips closed in the 200 BCE equivalent of a mic drop. So "yelp" would be the sort of syllable a boaster might utter.

ThirdParty wrote:Except that these are very old words whose meanings have evolved since they split. Back in Proto-Germanic, when "gielpan" was invented as a modified form of the established word "gielan"

ThirdParty wrote:Except that these are very old words whose meanings have evolved since they split. Back in Proto-Germanic, when "gielpan" was invented as a modified form of the established word "gielan"

How do you know this?

Cognates of "yell" appear all over the place in languages descended from PIE. Cognates of "yelp", on the other hand, appear only in Germanic languages. However, they do appear in both the West Germanic and North Germanic families. So I surmise that "yelp" was born in Proto-Germanic.

ThirdParty wrote:Except that these are very old words whose meanings have evolved since they split. Back in Proto-Germanic, when "gielpan" was invented as a modified form of the established word "gielan", "gielan" meant "to sing" (see "nightingale" = "night singer") and "gielpan" meant "to boast".

When I floated the idea of "yelp", I was considering arguing that "yell" is the sort of syllable one might sing (see "yodel" = "to utter a 'yo'"). If one were feeling boastful, and wanted to indicate that one's song had been perfect and there was nothing that could be added to it, one could then smack one's lips closed in the 200 BCE equivalent of a mic drop. So "yelp" would be the sort of syllable a boaster might utter.

But I admit that it's a stretch.

in addition to the Germanic reflexes, Pokorny has Lithuanian and maybe Slavic reflexes with a *-b or *-bh extension.

Oops. You're right. Okay, "yelp" is even older than I thought.

But it looks like it does mean something along the lines of "to boast" in the Balto-Slavic languages too, so the correction doesn't really affect my story.

"Bedraggled" keeps up the (trans)alliteration, but you might not like the syllabic mismatch."Tatty" does the repetition differently, but arguably has an even better rhythm. (Consider also "Teary-eyed and…"? Or 'Tinted'/'Tired'?)

That's just first thoughts, an online thesaurus might give much better alternatives. Depending on what you're going for, there may even be (for either/both of these 'antonyms' ) further synonyms singularly suited to produce your perfectly plosive patter.

I don't know that I'd consider "bedraggled" to alliterate, seeing as it's stressed on the second syllable.

There's "Bleary-eyed and battered-tailed", but the repetition of the dental suffix sounds weird there. "Bleary-eyed and beaten-tailed" could work. A bit more extreme, but sounding better than either, would be "Bleary-eyed and bloody-tailed".

Aiwendil wrote:I don't know that I'd consider "bedraggled" to alliterate, seeing as it's stressed on the second syllable.

The fact that it's differently stressed and also is dissimilar in syllable counts doesn't stop it alliterising. It lacks a decent equivalent consonance, but it is perfectly valid alliteration.

Anyway, it all depends on what the author requires. B-words (especially with following 't's and the ring of the 'r' and zhooshy nature of 'bushy') has a particular mental shape to it. "Tired-eyed and tatty-tailed", for example, uses its T-words to elicit a different, somewhat shattered, nature to the "Bleary" fuzziness (and the assonance in "Tired eyes" probably does duty, of its own).

"Mouldy-eyed and muddy-tailed" brings another flavour to the game ('moist' elicits ambiguities, in regard to eyes, avoid except for sadness). "Dreamy" matched with the suggested "droopy" has its own merits. Sleepy eyes and straggly tail..? Hmmm...

Not that we need whatever form of consonance, as mentioned, but inverting the template phrase and expecting a recognition to be elicited with minimal explanation does somewhat require that the core patter is preserved.

(All this, IMO. The individual who had the misfortune to teach me English Literature at school might never have believed me capable of such poetic analysis. I'm a prose person, and form and function was always lost to my analysis, for the sake of a good story with nominally normal words so writ.)

In a variety of English with a three way merger of the "father", "cot" and "caught" vowels, "law" would work. The song didn't originate in such a variety of English, if it did, they likely would have used something like "law, a legislative bill".

Mega85 wrote:In a variety of English with a three way merger of the "father", "cot" and "caught" vowels, "law" would work. The song didn't originate in such a variety of English, if it did, they likely would have used something like "law, a legislative bill".

...but then "fa, a long long way to run" wouldn't work. (I'm not aware of any dialects that have merged both father/cot/caught and fa/far.)

None of this is as important as fixing the monstrosity that is "Adieu, adieu, to ya and ya and ya." It's like the writer intended it to be "Adyoo to you and you and you," but someone told him he was mispronouncing "adieu," so he got angry and went off the deep end with mispronouncing words for the sake of a rhyme.